


Eight Days in D.C.

by Cherepashka



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky is good at going unnoticed, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Gen, How to be a person, calendars should start at zero, like the Dodgers moving to LA, the Smithsonian, you miss a lot when you're in cryo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 10:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4518375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cherepashka/pseuds/Cherepashka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier's latest mission isn't like the others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eight Days in D.C.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delicious upholstery (polly_oliver)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/polly_oliver/gifts).



> Dipping a toe in the fanfic waters. This story owes its existence to delicious upholstery, who 1) shoved me headlong into the fandom, 2) has been instrumental in getting my writing muscles moving again, and 3) convinced me this worked as a oneshot.
> 
> UPDATE: There is now a (very tangential) companion story to this one; see End Notes for details.

_Day 0. The Bank._

The mud sucks at the Soldier’s feet. He is hurt but not as badly as the man he drags. His injuries will heal fast enough. The man he drags, on the other hand…

The calculations are easy enough.

The man now lying in the mud heals quickly, like him. The Soldier woke for this mission already knowing that, because he had to be able to calibrate his attacks for the extra endurance. But for injuries like these, that won’t be enough. The man in the mud will need help.

So. If he is to survive, they must find him soon. That’s not a problem. They will find him soon. They had people in the air, who will see him, or who will track him through the device he used to speak to them while he disabled the helicarrier. But if he is to survive, they must give him medical attention, quickly. They will not do that while the Soldier is there. They will be afraid to approach, and they will try to neutralize him. He considers letting them––but no, that will still take too long. The man in the mud will die if they find him while the Soldier is still there.

So he leaves.

  


_Day 1. The Nothing._

The Winter Soldier always completes his missions. After each mission, he was given the coordinates of a safehouse to return to, or a rendezvous point where he would meet his handler. The rendezvous for this mission was supposed to be an empty warehouse across the Potomac. He was instructed to return there after eliminating his target.

He did not eliminate his target. He did not complete his mission. There were no instructions for what he should do if this were the case.

He does not go to the rendezvous.

_The Winter Soldier always completes his missions._

He stops, breathes. His breath is silent, softer than even he is able to hear, but he can feel it filling his chest. Inhale, hold for a ten count, exhale. Inhale, hold for a ( _pull the trigger_ ) ten count, exhale. ( _Time it so the motion of breathing doesn’t throw off his aim._ ) Inhale, hold for a ten count, exhale. His muscles relax.

The Winter Soldier always completes his missions. He did not complete his mission.

So. He is not the Winter Soldier.

He is not anything else either.

He is not anything.

  


_Day 2. The Name._

It is sunrise when he remembers that the man on the helicarrier, the man who would not fight, the man whom he knew, gave him something.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

A name. He gave him a name. James Buchanan Barnes.

He will find out what the name means. He is no longer the Winter Soldier, but with the name he is not nothing, either.

If he wants to find out more about the name, he must preserve himself, and do so without being found. It is midmorning when he drops from a fire escape and knocks out a man who hits the ground, unconscious, without ever seeing him. The man is smaller than he is but wears a denim jacket two sizes too large, so the jacket fits him well enough.

It is almost noon when he finds a baseball cap in a gutter. He turns it over in his hand. It is faded and dirty but might once have been blue. It has an _L_ and an _A_ embroidered on the front, overlapping and almost fully obscured by grime, and _Dodgers_ in small letters on the band in back. He frowns. Something about the cap feels wrong. He finds a bent rusty nail on the ground in an alley and uses it to pick out the threads of the _L_ and the _A_. It still feels wrong but not as wrong. He settles the cap on his head.

It is early afternoon when he sees restaurants and fast food joints growing crowded, and remembers that he must maintain his body’s energy intake. (Something in him insists, _We cannot compromise the asset’s physical capabilities,_ but he shakes his head to swat it away.) He finds a half-eaten meal, still in its paper bag, in a trash bin. He doesn’t know what it is; it is heavy with oil and salt and meat, and brings a great deal of saliva to his mouth. He does not remember ever feeling that much saliva in his mouth before.

He spends some hours observing. By sunset, he has learned to be invisible by tucking his hands into the jacket and pulling the cap low over his eyes and slumping forward so his chin hits his chest and sitting next to a small piece of cardboard that says _Lost my job NEED HELP God Bless_.

He glares at another invisible person with a cardboard sign at the mouth of a busy metro station until the man decides his territory is not worth defending and moves off. He plants himself in the vacated spot. He waits to hear the name.

  


_Day 5. The Location._

He waits for three days and eleven metro stations. From the eighth station he can see where they are repairing damage on a building half-destroyed in the helicarrier fight. He thinks about them repairing damage on the man from the helicarrier as well. It is summer and humid but there is gooseflesh on his arms. He only stays at the eighth station for an hour before moving on.

At the eleventh metro station he hears the child. She is talking quickly and the man with her is laughing and telling her to watch where you’re going, Emma, and not really listening. Her high-pitched voice catches his ear.

Then the glossy piece of paper she carries carefully in both hands catches his eye. On the paper is the face of the man from the helicarrier. The face on the paper is unbloodied. The child’s voice is not very loud but it carries clearly.

“––so _cool_ , dad, oh man, the Howling Commandos were the greatest! And Andrew better admit I was right or I’m gonna punch him, girls _did too_ join them sometimes, Agent Carter had her own _whole exhibit_.” She pauses. “That was really sad about Bucky Barnes though. I bet Cap really missed him.” Barnes. _James Buchanan Barnes._ And the man on the helicarrier had called him Bucky.

The girl and the man are getting farther away and harder to hear through the noise of an arriving train. Even so, as the man palms a card to a turnstile and they disappear through automated gates, he catches her saying, “Please can we go to the Smithsonian again tomorrow?”

He already has the name.

And now he has a location.

  


_Day 6. The Museum._

The people milling around him do not notice him. They are very good at not seeing what they do not expect to see.

He does not know what he expected to see. The larger-than-life sepia image before him is labeled Bucky Barnes and does not really look like him. He knows; he caught his reflection in a pair of sunglasses when he was coming up the stairs. He does not know how it could be him.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

He breathes slowly and observes closely. It’s not the facial structure itself that fails to match. But the face in the image, even though it is completely still and a little out-of-focus, seems somehow mobile. The people around him are smiling or laughing or frowning or widening their eyes, and the face in the image seems like it might do any one of these things at any moment. He does not know how to make his face do that.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

He files away the information from the display. The dates underneath it say _1917-1944_. James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes was born and raised in Brooklyn. He enlisted after Pearl Harbor and was sent to the front a year later. Something about that nags but he doesn’t know what.* He was captured at Bolzano and imprisoned in a HYDRA facility. After his rescue by Captain America ( _threetwofivefiveseven_ ––he blinks and the rest of the numbers are gone) he joined the Howling Commandos. He fell to his death from a train during a mission in the Alps in 1944.

Bucky Barnes is dead.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

The newspaper someone dropped at the entrance to Dupont Circle in the morning said _August 12, 2014_. Bucky Barnes died in 1944.

_Your name is James Buchanan Barnes._

He stands there for a long while before noticing that no one else stops for as long, that they all look for a minute or two and move on. They make so many extraneous, purposeless movements: taking hands in and out of pockets, rolling shoulders, tilting heads, shifting weight from foot to foot. It occurs to him that someone might notice he makes no such movements. No one has yet, but they might. So he turns and walks slowly through the rest of the exhibit.

The face of the man from the helicarrier is everywhere. He sees it plastered on a big display in the same larger-than-life sepia as the picture of Bucky Barnes. This display says _Captain America (Steven Grant Rogers)_. The dates underneath it are off-center, too far to the right. _1918-1944, 2014-._

He looks at the Captain America display for almost as long as he looked at the Bucky Barnes one. No one notices. He has a name now for the man on the helicarrier. It’s only when his tongue hits the back of his teeth, silently, that he realizes his mouth has moved to form the shape of the name. _Steven Grant Rogers._

_Steve._

  


_Day 7. The Mission._

It has taken him a week, but he understands now that when the man on the helicarrier ( _Steve_ ) gave him a name, he was giving him a new mission. A new target. James Buchanan Barnes.

The target is anomalous, in that he has been dead for seventy years.

He has never had an already-dead target. Always before, his targets were soon-to-be-dead. Always before, his mission was to kill them.

Now, he has a different kind of mission. He lacks the experience for it. He will adapt.

Now, his mission is to bring the target back to life.

He has completed eighty-seven missions successfully. He has failed to complete one.

He will not fail again.

**Author's Note:**

> *Bucky's service number in the film begins with the digits 32557. The initial code 32 was issued to draftees from New York, New Jersey, and Delaware starting in 1942. However, the exhibit states that he enlisted voluntarily shortly after Pearl Harbor, which if true would have gotten him a service number starting with 12. My headcanon here is that he was in fact drafted, but someone responsible for propaganda fudged the story to make him seem more of a hero. Bucky is understandably Not Amused even if he doesn't yet know why. Do I think the real Smithsonian would do something like this? Absolutely not. But hey, fiction.
> 
> So I do have some ideas about what happens to Bucky after Day 7 in this story. Will I ever write them? Probably not anytime soon, so treat this as a oneshot. That said, if I ever happen upon a massive pile of free time (unlikely), this may get a sequel.
> 
> UPDATE: There now exists a companion piece, Sixteen Months from Fallujah, about the other homeless guy at the metro station from Day 2. It only vaguely ties into the Captain America/MCU storyline and is not Civil War-canon-compliant. It's really more of its own thing, although it takes place in the Eight Days in D.C. universe, so I haven't put it up on AO3. If you're interested in reading it, you can request a copy via email to cherepashka1729 at gmail dot com.


End file.
